I wasn’t expecting more from the day than one of Alison’s wonderful lunches, a wander round her lovely kitchen garden, and the opportunity to be able to gaze at Joshua Sparkes for a whole day without appearing socially inappropriate.

I have dabbled with KNF (Korean Natural Farming) before. I put it in my book. I took it out again because I felt like a fraud for pretending I knew anything about it, and then felt braver and put it all back in again. So I wasn’t expecting to have my mind particularly blown.

You can see where this is going.

I feel like I have come home a different person. I shall try and capture a little of the magic for you but I fear, dear reader, that I may just have to write another book.

So, just at the point that I had absolutely nailed compost making, it became apparent that there is more to gardening than this. We have become so used to thinking in a very mechanistic way about soil management, focusing on structure and texture and, at best, the very blunt tools of adding nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the macronutrients of the plant world. But as we are starting to learn about the human gut microbiome, it turns out lots of people have been working with the soil’s microbiome for a very long time.

I truly believe that human beings have developed the capacity over millennia to detect microbes in soil. I can feel good compost. I don’t know if it is through touch or smell or how, I just know that I can feel it. There are bits of my soil that make me happy just to touch it. There are other bits, more recently top dressed with council green waste that are texturally perfect (such easy weeding), but they don’t make me feel anything. And there is the kitchen garden. Turned over from lawn four years ago and all the compost top dressing in the world haven’t made it alive. I don’t like digging it and I don’t really like touching it.

It needs life.

 Joshua introduced us to the idea of IMO’s, Indigenous Micro-organisms. IMO are the microorganisms (beneficial fungi, bacteria, and yeasts) that have been adapting and surviving within the native soil environments throughout the years. The essence of these is that, like the microbes in your sourdough starter, they are individual to your place. That for longer than people have been around, IMO’s have been teeming in the earth; forming perfectly balanced systems within the microclimate, the aspect, the soil, the types of plants, everything exquisitely in harmony to create a rich, diverse web of life. I keep wanting to write your IMO’s because the emphasis is on these being very specific and adapted to the environment around you, but I do not mean that these are yours. IMO’s are bigger than any of us.

The first step is to find a way of collecting and breeding the IMO life from their home near you, and then introducing it into the soil that needs it. This is done by putting a food for IMO’s into a box in a microbial rich environment, ancient woodland is generally considered optimal, and tempting it in. Think like one of those live mouse traps baited with peanut butter, although for IMO’s, partially cooked white rice is used, and you need to keep the mice out, not let them in. Joshua showed us his lucky IMO box, an old oak box with holes and slits cut into it. He takes out ten boxes at a time (the failure rate with IMO tempting is quite high), buries it in a nest of leaf mold and decaying twigs, and waits for the IMO’s to make their home in the box.

 A white fuzz appears all over the rice when the inoculation has happened, and then they can be harvested and carried very very carefully back to where you need them to be. This is IMO 1.

I am at the stage of still sourcing my box and pondering where is the best place to bury it, but Joshua showed us how to mix it with brown sugar to make IMO 2, a stable sticky brown substance that you can keep for a while, because the microbes have been sent into stasis by the sugar. Think sourdough starter in the fridge.

Getting it all going again means giving the inert IMO’s a massive feed to bump them back into life. For sourdough, this is a big feed of flour and water, for IMO’s Joshua used oats, leaf mold and some old bark chippings that Alison had had stored in bags for a while. All mixed together, like a great big loaf. And this is IMO 3. Like a sourdough bake, there is a process of turning and heating, cooling and heating again. Like a compost heap, it heats up as the IMO’s burst into life and feast on the material you have given them, but too hot and they will cook.  Heaping and flattening is what manages this, but I promise you, it is a lot less laborious than turning a full compost heap.

This is when you can put it on your soil, and let it spread its wonderful life into your growing space. I will be documenting in minute detail how I do mine and probably getting it wrong a few times before I get it right, and I would love you to try it with me.

In the meantime, there is an easy solution to be getting on with, the LAB (Lactic Acid Bacteria or Lacto Bacillus). If the IMO’s are the kefirs and the sauerkrauts of the plant world, then LAB are the antibiotics. (This doesn’t entirely make sense, because human antibiotics are globally bad for microbiota, LAB seem to just eat the bad ones.)

And so this is how I am spending my Sunday morning…

 LAB Culture Instructions

1.     Wash two cups of organic brown rice or organic oats in two cups of water. Keep swirling it until the water is quite cloudy.

2.     Pour off the water into a kilner jar and cover with cheesecloth or kitchen paper. Leave in a warm place out of direct sunlight for two or three days until you can smell a sweet smell. This is it starting to ferment. You might get a layer or mat of solids on the top, which is fine, but make sure you discard this bit.

3.     Fill another kilner jar two thirds full of milk. I use organic, full fat cow’s milk. Add some of the fermenting rice/oat wash water so that there is a ratio of about 1 part rice water to 10 parts milk. Put the cheesecloth back on the top and leave in the warm place again.

4.     The milk will start to separate into a thick layer of solids on top and clearish fluid, the LAB, underneath. It is the clear fluid you want but be careful not to disturb any of the solids into it when you lift them out.

5.     Apparently, this solid layer makes excellent cheese, but I have not been brave enough to try it.

How to use LAB

Drink it. Joshua swears blind by a shot of LAB every morning for gut health.

Reducing methane going into the environment. Spraying LA onto animal bedding, as well as feeding it to chicken and livestock means you can have ‘no smell’ chicken bedding and even no smell pigs.

Kick start the best sorts of life in your compost heap. Compost heaps that have got too wet mean that the aerobic organisms (those that need oxygen) drown and the anaerobic ones start to dominate and these are the ones that smell. LAB produces oxygen and so compost heaps, and very compacted soil, get fluffier and more aerated in their presence. This, in turn, facilitates the ‘good’ aerobic bacteria and a positive cycle is set up.

A foliar spray (remember you must dilute to 1:1000)

A soil drench

You see? Already this has turned into an essay. I think we all left the day with Joshua with spinning heads and full brains and I will be working hard to break this down into something that we can use in our gardens every day. Just like I now have an easy routine with sourdough and I can keep producing loaves with effortless regularity, I am going to stitch fermenting and brewing for my garden into my every day life. Fancy joining me?